Yerwei followed her through the sitting room and on to the music room, until they reached the grand parlor where Makhi had once sat at her mother’s knee, listening to stories of the first Taban queens—warriors who, accompanied by their retinue of tame falcons, had come down from the highest mountains in the Sikurzoi to rule the Shu. Taban yenok-yun, they were called. The storm that stayed.

The palace had been built by those queens, and it was still a marvel of engineering and beauty. It belonged to the Taban dynasty. It belonged to the people. And for this brief moment—just a few measured steps in the march of the Taban line—it belonged to Makhi. She felt her spirits lift as they entered the Court of the Golden Wing. It was a room of gilded light and flowing water, the slender, repeating arches of its terrace framing the groomed hedges and burbling fountains of the royal gardens below, and beyond them, the plum orchards of Ahmrat Jen, the trees standing like a regiment of soldiers in tidy rows. It was winter in Ravka, but here in the Shu Han, in this blessed land, the sun still shone warm.

Makhi walked out onto the terrace. This was one of the few places she felt safe talking, away from the prying eyes and curious ears of servants and spies. A green glass table had been set with pitchers of wine and water and a platter of late figs. In the garden below, she saw her niece Akeni playing with one of the gardener’s boys. If Makhi didn’t conceive daughters with one of her consorts, she had decided Akeni would one day inherit the crown. She wasn’t the oldest of the Taban girls, but even at eight years old she was clearly the brightest. A surprise, given that her mother had the depth of a dinner plate.

“Aunt Makhi!” Akeni shouted from below. “We found a bird’s nest!”

The gardener’s boy did not speak or look directly at the queen, but stood silently beside his playmate, eyes on his battered sandals.

“You must not touch the eggs,” Makhi called down to them. “Look but do not touch.”

“I won’t. Do you want flowers?”

“Bring me a yellow plum.”

“But they’re sour!”

“Bring one to me and I’ll tell you a story.” She watched as the children ran toward the southern wall of the garden. The fruit was high in the trees and would take time and ingenuity to reach.

“She is a good child,” said Yerwei from the archway behind her. “Perhaps too biddable to make a good queen.”

Makhi ignored him.

“Princess Ehri is alive,” he said.

She grabbed the pitcher and hurled it down onto the paving stones below.

She tore the curtains from the windows and shredded them with her fingernails.

She buried her face in the silk pillows and screamed.

She did none of those things.